17 Feb 16th–Feb 22nd, 2023 phoenixnewtimes.com phoenix new Times | cONTeNTs | feeDBacK | OPiNiON | NeWs | feaTuRe | NighT+Day | culTuRe | film | cafe | music | charged with assault after a university police officer found him sawing through a wrought iron fence. Palmer was trying to access his irrigation lines that ran through GCU’s campus, and which he had asked the school not to fence off, he said. Court documents about the incident allege that when officers approached Palmer and asked him to stop cutting into the fence, he “cursed” at officers and refused, then “pushed an officer in the chest with his right hand … and turned toward the officer with the saw, which was still running in his left hand.” Palmer doesn’t deny cutting the fence, but scoffs at the idea that he assaulted the cop. “I saw [the officer] charge at me,” he recalled. “And I remember so vividly that I didn’t want to drop my new saw because I didn’t want it to break.” Palmer said he held the saw to the side, and the officer ran into his other arm. Then, two officers “slammed me on the hood of his truck and handcuffed me,” Palmer said, leaving him with an injury to his elbow that still nags him. Although the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office pursued the case for two years, prosecutors ultimately dropped the charges against Palmer. GCU’s latest arguments against Palmer also have run into some trouble in court. At a July hearing, Palmer’s attorneys showed he had evicted tenants shortly after the May 2021 and April 2022 arrests. A Phoenix police officer who worked with Palmer testified that the issues on his prop- erty improved in recent months. “The dorms next door to Mr. Palmer’s property have many more times the amount of [police] calls,” Greenman, Palmer’s attorney, told New Times. “Cops get called all the time. It’s a busy area.” That made it more difficult to prove that Palmer’s property was a particular problem, he said. In July, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Rodrick Coffey sided with Palmer and refused GCU’s request for a court-appointed receiver to oversee Palmer’s property. “Defendant demonstrated that he took steps to address problematic tenants once he became aware of their involvement in criminal activity,” he wrote in his opinion. “The Court does not find that the few inci- dents relied upon by Plaintiffs demonstrate that the Property is ‘regularly used in the commission of a crime.’” GCU has not given up the lawsuit, drag- ging it into settlement hearings and a poten- tial trial. A settlement conference is scheduled for April 11. “It’s our opinion that they’re trying to cause a headache,” Greenman said. “They’re trying to push him to be so annoyed that he sells the property.” The university disagreed. “The lawsuit was filed for the sole purpose of ensuring the safety and welfare of GCU’s students, faculty and staff, which is of the utmost importance,” Romantic said. Palmer isn’t swayed. “I tell my daugh- ters, if you sell it to GCU, I’ll come back and haunt you,” he said. Banners displayed on Palmer’s property proclaim in bold red type, “Woe on GCU.” The signs caused quite a commotion among the student body and on TikTok when Palmer strung them up. Underneath “Woe on GCU” is a refer- ence to a Bible verse: 1 Kings 21: 1-16. The passage is a short fable about a king that asks a humble man for his vineyard, offering money for the land, or even a better vineyard elsewhere. But the man declines, telling the king that “the Lord forbid that I should give you the inheri- tance of my ancestors.” When the man refuses, the king orches- trates his execution. Palmer, like the man in the Bible verse, is holding on to his inheritance, too. But he also has other goals for the land. When GCU offered Palmer to buy his property, he countered. “I said I want $6 million for my place, and I’m going to keep $2 million for me and my family — that’s about what the real market value would be — and I said I’m going to donate the other $4 million for homeless people and drug rehab,” he said. The university said that Palmer requested far more money. “Mr. Palmer’s latest ask in exchange for his two-acre property was $21 million plus a nearby half- acre property that GCU owns,” Romantic wrote. “That, of course, is not realistic.” Palmer said he also wants to develop the land to provide transitional housing for low- income veterans. He has been working with John Mendibles, a lobbyist and executive director of the League of Veterans. Mendibles, a former Superior mayor with fraud convictions, told New Times that the lawsuit and a pot of funding that got tied up in the state legislature has stalled those plans. “He is determined that he is going to put in low-rent housing for veterans,” said Dieckman, Palmer’s longtime neighbor. But she understood GCU’s frustration with Palmer and the property, which she remem- bered had always been “a little rough.” “I told him, they’ve made their mistakes,” she said. “But so have you.” For now, the property sits as it has for decades. Behind his rentals, back by his father’s old welding shop and the cow pasture, debris has collected over the years — rusting hubcaps and rotting furni- ture, an old motorboat, scrap metal, and the belongings of a wheelchair-bound man Palmer met in a grocery store parking lot, who lived for a time in a vehicle in the back. Weathered pecan trees are full of fruit. “Us kids used to go out and pick them. We’d dry them out and bag ’em up. My dad bought both of us a red wagon, and we’d go out into the subdivisions with a wagon full of pecans,” Palmer said. Nowadays, though, the pecans are scattered on the ground with the rest of his things. “Nobody even picks them anymore. They go to Walmart,” he said, grabbing one and cracking it in his hands. “We’re too prosperous of a country, you know.” Gail Palmer at the fence of his Colter Street property. Jacob Tyler Dunn
